Bindrune Recordings: Woodland Denizens unite!

Oakenthrone #6 (John Mincemoyer)
Chet W. Scott under his mystical Blood of the Black Owl form returns with his second full-length, A Feral Spirit. Following the stunning self-titled debut, A Feral Spirit, according to Bindrune “documents the journey of one man’s loss of spirit through addiction and rediscovery of self through both the ancient gods and nature itself.” With all sound composition created by Scott he called upon Danial Ellis Harrod to supply the “lyrical charge and written spells.” This collaboration certainly works as Scott manipulates: “BC Rich baritone guitars, acoustic guitar, organs, crow and condor totem native flutes, wood and clay ocarinas, voices, V-drums, ritual hand percussion, thunder gong, long horns, ritual goat hoof shaker and stag antler rattle as wellas environmental and totem spirit recordings” to grand effect. A Feral Spirit is a dark, epic journey towards self-realization and purification. Weathering the nightmarish darkness exposes dawning light and hope. The organic ritual atmospheres are juxtaposed against crushing avalanches of metallic dissonance creating an ever-shifting panorama that mimics nature’s duality of creative beauty (light) and unchecked destruction (dark). In shaman guise, Scott deftly manipulates myriad sounds to create moods that float and ride upon nature’s arcane, magical, and unseen currents. Both corporeal and spiritual, A Feral Spirit resonates strongly, striking powerful chords that are as deeply compelling as they are initially horrifying.

www.antimusic.com/www.thrashpit.com (Mark Hensch)
Blood of the Black Owl's A Feral Spirit is every bit a spirit journey as it is a heavy metal album. At times frenzied and ferocious, at others serene and meditative, Spirit captures the human experience from the perspective of the natural world. Given how humanity has at times been nature's savior and slayer both, it makes for a schizophrenic, at times transcendental, experience.

Formed in 2004 as Svart Ugle ("Black Owl" in Norwegian), Blood of the Black Owl immediately concerned itself with producing reflective, deeply spiritual metal. At its heaviest, this music takes the form of immeasurably heavy funeral doom. At its lightest, it manifests itself in a form of trippy, paranoid folk music which owes Native American ritualism a heavy debt. Having liked the band since its self-titled 2006 debut, I can safely say that Spirit is a mind-blowing culmination of these traits.

Opening cut "Spell of the Elk," for starters, is less a song and more an invocation. Soft, moody woodwinds expand horizons while singer/songwriter Chet W. Scott chants recitations about the glory of nature over ringing drums. Interspersed within this shamanistic moment are sounds of weather, animals, and natural events, all of which gives the song a deeply immersive feel.

Contrasting this is "Crippling of Age," the likes of which smashes bones with a veritable war hammer of unexpected doom. The riffs dance with wild fury, switching chaotically and drawing listeners into their primal rage. Once exhausted, this anger is replaced by a cool, shimmering guitar run which slowly fades into yet another assault on the senses.

"The Melancholy Article," meanwhile, mixes ethereal guitar tones, woeful pipes and stark organ hums into a potion of sadness. The whole thing pulls together a claustrophobic tension, the likes of which never explodes. Rather than ending in fiery holocaust, the song instead sinks beneath a mournful wail, never to return.

Last but not least, "Journey of the Plague Year" deftly weaves all these disparate elements into one fantastic song. Beginning only with the mournful simplicity of open guitar notes, the song slowly builds itself into a towering hulk of psychedelic riffs espousing nothing but despair and entropy.

The true measure of art is how well the artist conveys a different worldview. A Feral Spirit achieves this mission in spades – this is a unique, powerful call to arms over how humanity treats its own environment. Though a long journey – the album clocks in at 71 minutes – those seeking a profound soul-searching will find it here. Mystical and majestic, A Feral Spirit is that rare album where innovation and conviction meet with stunning results.

Corazine.com
Black metal ambience, creepy-voiced spoken word, droned out guitar instrumentation with utter bleakness the result. Meet Blood of the Black Owl, a singular artist whose new disc, "A Feral Spirit," absconds with the listener's sanity for nine tracks worth of otherworldly - yet quite earthy - musical experimentation. Kicking off with a track that is freaky with an unnervingly reserved approach - sounds of nature forge the backdrop for those creaky-voiced lines of poetic darkness. Then the music kicks in. Heavy bursts of black metal punctuate long, drifting passages of grim quietude, the guitars forming a distorted line behind the spooky voice and its succulent shadow verbage. This is one to play loud with the lights out and the eyes closed. It's an inward journey into the lunar night of our souls.

Metal Maniacs (JWW)
I have been following Chet Scott for over 10 years now from his stellar work as Ruhr Hunter, to his organic acoustic funeral doom of The Elemental Chrysalis to his latest endeavor, The Blood Of The Black Owl. A Feral Spirit is the band's sophomore release and further develops and evolves the band's trademark heathen doom. Interspersed with narration, nature sounds, and ritualistic instruments this album explores the depths of human spirituality, and how music can help us connect with the beast within.

The album opens up with "Spell Of The Elk" which unfortunately, I find tiresome and unnecessary. It acts as an intro to build up to "Crippling Of Age" but comes off as weak and perfunctory and doesn't hold up to the quality and sincerity of the rest of the album. This however, is the album's one flaw. Treat this as a bitter appetizer, and let's move on to the main course.

Like Blood Of The Black Owl's self titled debut album, A Feral Spirit is mostly comprised of droning blackened doom with hints of everything from Burzum to Khold to early Darkthrone. The main difference being the strange instrumentation thrown in here and there and the absolutely haunting quality of the arrangements and compositions. It is pretty obvious upon listening that this is a home based recording, but please do not mistake this for the bedroom black metal of Xasthur or Leviathan, Chet has found the key to using a home studio to enhance the esoteric and primal quality within the music, not merely creating mud like so many others.

A Feral Spirit is one more gem in Chet Scott's crown, a well deserved one, and I highly recommend this album to anyone that appreciates heathen metal or folk, or simply likes to listen and take a journey.

teethofthedivine.com (Erik Thomas)
Chet Scott’s 2006 self titled debut was an excellent doomy, ambient, almost stoner take on depressive Pacific Northwest, one man black metal, giving the scene an injection of creativity that strayed from typical depressive Wrest and Malefic worship. And the follow up, while taking the same elements, delivers an even more tribal, ritualistic, organic and almost Native American take on the genre.

While my ‘Wrest tripping balls in the forest’, still stands as an apt comparison, Chet Scott appears to have taken some hits from a peace pipe and connected with the spirit world as well as injecting the expected ambience, shoegaze and doom into his blackened, transcendental musical outlet. If Brown Jenkins was Cthulhu’s blackened drone mouthpiece, then Blood of the Black Owl is the spiritual angst of mother nature and The Great Spirit.

Fuzzed out guitars lope and drone amid tribal simplistic drums laced with injections of organic ambiance and Chet’s grizzled chants (plying lyrics written by Daniel Ellis Harrod) for 63 minutes of introspective, mystical music . From lengthy introduction of the chanted “Spell of the Elk” which leads right into the stern march of “Crippling of Age” through the hypnotic “He Who Walked Away From the Fire & Laughed As He Bled” (the section that starts at 3:43 is mesmerizing), steady march of “Void” (which is initially the album’s harshest track before the church organ drenched mid section and ritualistic closure), to delicate and somber acoustics of “The Melancholy Article”, the album is a truly captivating and hypnotic journey into another spiritual realm without spiraling into depression. Just listen to “Unattainable Vistas of Our Remembrances” and rangy closer “Journey of the Plague Year” to hear the deft evolution in the chord structures and progressions from malevolence to a more introspective ambivalence that Blood of the Black Owl has subtly made between albums.

Less malevolent, paranoid and ‘icky’ than the debut, the aptly named A Feral Spirit seems to be a more deliberate, tempered and personal record that looks to heal wounds and soul search rather than open them up and drag you into an emotional abyss. And that is a welcome development to the genre, and I hope the development continues for the next album.

Musique Machine (Roger Batty)
A Feral Spirit is the second chapter in Chet Scott’s (of Ruhr Hunter, Elemental Chrysalis and Glass throat records) metallic folk/rock project. It sees him building on and adding to the elements from the wonderful self titled Blood of the Black Owl from 07. Through out the nine tracks on offer here we find an more tribal tone and world music & atmospheric edge elements been mixed in.

Things start off wonderful brooding and un-metallic with the track Spell of the Elk; which is built around slow ominous Native American Indian percussion, native Indian flute, field recordings and Chet’s gravely and haunted tone. Really it’s a goose-bump inducing opener that sets you down in the vast plans and rain drenched forest of a Native American tribe before the Whiteman arrived. By track two Crippling Of Age - the metallic violent air kicks in big time with a wonderful barbaric and dense mid-pace riff battering, it's stop briefly for an enchanted acoustic refrain before slamming back in with grim earthy metallic power. And that’s really how the rest of the album works; balancing atmosphere and brutally wonderfully, but with really depth and conviction of sound and belief.

Through really the album is error-less and engaging through-out it’s hour plus playing time- a few stand-out moments come in the form of : the bright, yet haunted and harmonic clean guitar pickings, piping flute and raising organ atmospherics of The Melancholy Article with Chet offering a gravely yet passionate vocal uttering’s on top about the destruction of the native American lands. Unattainable Vistas Of Our Remembrances with its cold grim and fuzzed blues tinged guitar opening, which launchers in brutally chugging riff matter that feels like Chet has harnessed the grim sprit of the forest in his guitar. The rest of the tracks swings wonderful between atmospheric and brutal riff forest bludgeoning. And as always with anything involving Mr Scott there’s an impressive and exotic array of instrumental colour and shade for A Feral Spirit he users the following: Organs, Crow & Condor Totem Native Flutes, Wood & Clay Ocarinas, V-Drums, Ritual Hand Percussion, Thunder Gong, Long Horns, Ritual Goat Hoof Shaker & Stag Antler Rattle, Environmental & Totem Spirit Recordings

A superbly solid, consistent and wonderful worked second album from the project which balances haunting beauty, wonderful divined atmospherics, compositionally depth & invention with brutal and crushing riff weight. Simply put another masterpiece from Mr Scott.

Sea of Tranquility Webzine (Denis Brunelle)
Gee, that was quite unusual! Of course, it had to be released on Bindrune Recordings, home of one of my favorite albums of 2008, Cold Northern Vengeance's Domination and Servitude. The cover artwork invites the listener to dwell into some sort of mystical Pagan world. In this case, it is solo artist Chet W. Scott's own musical vision, inspired by the words of Daniel Ellis Harrod.

A Feral Spirit is somewhat hard to categorized, due to multiple sources of inspiration. The first thing you hear, the opening track called "Spell of the Elk", is a Shamanic incantation with nature samplings, including diverse animals, percussions, flute and some electronics. This intro last nearly ten minutes. The Shamanic references are re-appearing in a few, but shorter, occasions. These occurrences are bringing a touch of harmonies, and they are often combined with clean arpeggios, flute, ambient keyboards and the likes. The bulk of the musical structure here is made of slow to mid paced tempos paired with real heavy guitar riffs and spoken raspy vocals with a touch of sickness in them. This 70 minutes plus opus is composed of intense Black/Doom Metal essentially. Even if A Feral Spirit is not for everyone, this disc will be well received by those with a liking for the darkest spectrum of the extreme music. Just to add an intriguing edge to this mysterious album, some keyboard and guitar parts have a bit of a psychedelic tone, expanding Mr. Scott's twisted musical palette.

A Feral Spirit is, artistically speaking, a great and mysterious extreme Metal release, with numerous superb compositions such as: "Crippling of Age", "The Melancholy Article" and "Forest of Decrepitude".

Judas Kiss (By Simon Collins)
A Feral Spirit is the second album from Blood Of The Black Owl, following 2007's eponymous debut album, also released on Bindrune Recordings. There was also a long-deleted three-track demo CD-R, and a split 12" with Celestiial was released this year, which has also been reviewed by Judas Kiss.

Blood Of The Black Owl (BOTBO hereafter) was originally a solo project of Chet W. Scott, also of Ruhr Hunter and The Elemental Chrysalis, but for the split with Celestiial, Chet was joined by James Woodhead and Daniel Ellis Harrod. However, for A Feral Spirit all music was performed by Chet Scott, with lyrics being written by Daniel Ellis Harrod. Evidently, these recordings predate the recordings for the split release, but have ended up being released later.

A Feral Spirit opens, though, with 'Spell Of The Elk', a track credited to Ruhr Hunter, with both the song title and performer's name given in runic characters. Since both Ruhr Hunter and BOTBO were at this point solo projects of Chet Scott, this is a fine distinction to make, although in fact the two projects have markedly different sounds, and 'Spell Of The Elk' undoubtedly sounds more like Ruhr Hunter than BOTBO. Long, lonely flute notes resonate across a desolate soundscape, with rumbles of thunder and low drums in the background, as Chet intones the lyrics in a dramatic, growled spoken-word style:

We are the wolf…

The coyote…

The crow and the raven…

We are the earth…

The mist-shrouded atmosphere of this song reminds me of 'The Sower & The Sown', a track from Ruhr Hunter's 2002 album, Torn Of This.

After this introduction, it's time for BOTBO to be unleashed. For those with no previous experience of Chet Scott's various musical projects, as well as those of other artists associated with the Glass Throat label, the sound of BOTBO is quite difficult to describe or categorise. One press release for A Feral Sprit describes the music as 'a primitive fusion of slow tempo Earth Metal & Woodland Ritualistic Doom', which gives some indication of what to expect. As with all of Chet Scott's recordings, a large variety of instruments are employed on A Feral Spirit, including electric and acoustic guitar, electric organ, drums, various hand percussion like shakers and rattles, gongs, flutes, horns, ocarinas and field recordings.

'Crippling Of Age' segues straight in from 'Spell Of The Elk', marking the transition from one project to the other with a violent assault of discordant, black metal guitar and roaring vocals, as abrupt and jarring as the sudden descent of a raptor on its prey. As with all basically slow metal with acoustic accompaniment, there's an evident debt to Neurosis, but BOTBO also sound something like contemporary funeral doom bands such as Nortt and Grívf. This is far from straightforward doom metal, though – it's more accurate to say that doom is one of many elements in Chet's musical craft.

'He Who Walked Away From The Fire & Laughed As He Bled' opens with mellow prog-rock and delicate guitar arpeggios providing an intriguing contrast to the hoarse, rasping vocals, but then around the midpoint of the song, these elements succumb to a wall of fuzzy riffing, before the two blend into a powerfully elegiac trudge towards the end. 'Void' provides some of the album's harshest moments, with the first few minutes of anguished screamed vocals and cataclysmically clashing guitar chords inviting comparison to black metal acts like Xasthur and Leviathan. This leads into a melodic section of church organ and spoken vocals, before this in turn gives way to sustained black ambient drones and shaken percussion. The harrowing lyrics of 'Void' depict the seductive nihilism of drug addiction.

'The Melancholy Article' is much gentler, remaining essentially within the prog-rock parameters of the opening section of 'He Who Walked Away From The Fire…', even sounding a bit new-agey with its smooth, soothing guitar and flutes, although Chet's growling vocals prevent a wholesale descent into whale-hugging.

'Forest Of Decrepitude' stands out for its memorable, Sabbathesque guitar hook, which sticks in the memory long after the song's hypnotic, trudging beat and eerie siren-like cadences have faded away. The closing track, 'Journey Of The Plague Year', is largely acoustic and quite subdued, although, after a Ruhr Hunter-style passage of Native American flute and throat singing, it ends with some emphatically doomy riffing, embellished with descending keyboard lines.

In terms of comparisons to Chet Scott's other work, it seems evident that BOTBO has become a depository for the darker and more aggressive tendencies in Ruhr Hunter. Whereas early Ruhr Hunter works involved a lot of black ambient noise, the most recent Ruhr Hunter album, 2006's Moss & Memory, was more tranquil. If Ruhr Hunter is now chiefly concerned with a harmonious communion with nature, BOTBO acknowledges, and even celebrates, the starker, harsher, more predatory and, yes, feral aspects of the natural world. But of course harmony and conflict, creation and destruction, are artificial constructs of the human point of view. It's all one and the same to the blind, amoral forces of nature. Whether a lamb is born or a forest burns, the balance is restored. It would seem to follow from this that Chet's various different musical projects should steadily move towards convergence – a totalising, holistic vision of nature in all its myriad aspects, from the most beautiful to the most savage. But maybe this work is too much for one lifetime. For now though, the night is over, the black owl's flight is done, and as the rays of the rising sun filter through the dense tree canopy to the forest floor far below, the predators retreat to the shadows until it's time to set out on the hunt once more. Life goes on. And whilst A Feral Spirit offers a more coherent and integrated vision than the first BOTBO album, I feel like Chet hasn't got to where he's headed with all this nature mysticism just yet. We're on a path, but not at the heart of the forest.

A Feral Spirit comes beautifully presented in a gatefold digipack sleeve bearing images of skulls, runes and bones. Concurrent with the release of the CD version of A Feral Spirit by Bindrune Recordings, there is a 1000-copy limited-edition double LP version available from the English label Aurora Borealis, a small number of which come with an elk-hide patch hand-crafted by Chet Scott under ritual conditions and blessed with sage smoke. There is also a new Blood Of The Black Owl album entitled A Banishing Ritual currently in preparation, which should see the light of day in 2009.

AQUARIUS RECORDS
Not to be confused, as we sometimes (almost) do, with brutal black metallers Book Of The Black Earth, who also have a new album out, soon to be reviewed here as well. This band is the one whom we last heard sharing a dirgey split 12" with Celestiial. Here's there new full-length and, as we expected, it's some serious doom metal/post rock/black metal/ambient hybrid wyrdness from the same guy responsible for the shamanic, organic drones of Ruhr Hunter.

Ok, the first track, "Spell Of The Elk", mostly (gruffly) spoken and atmospheric, is cool enough but mainly serves as a 9-minute intro to track 2, "Crippling Of Age", when things really get intense, the guitar kicks into gear, the hammer drops, the fuzz explodes, the totemic blood of this black owl flows thick and dark. This is musick full of creepy guttural croakings, seasick shoegazing droned-out riffery, and some seriously doooooomic plod, along with sudden yet graceful dynamic shifts from apocalyptic destructiveness to introspective dreaminess, yeah!!!

Many of these nine fairly lengthy tracks seem like ceremonial mini-epics, with gentle keyboard melodies wandering in from some obscure '70s Italian horror flick soundtrack, haunted by heavy doses of fuzzed out riff-sludge, providing a terror-struck background to the disturbing internal monologue (prayer?) played out by the anguished, echoed vokills. So much of this is surprisingly beautiful, so much of it fantastically fuzzed. The mystic moodiness is enhanced by foresty flutes and bone rattles from Native American / New Age ritual amidst all the industrial-strength dirge. This is part Neurosis, part Godspeed, part Burzum. Maybe part Bohren, and even part Thuja too! Well, possibly an aboriginal Thuja, when it really quiets down and spaces out and enters the Dreamtime. One of those "metal" records we recommend to a wider audience of adventurous listeners for sure.

Metalreview.com (Michael Wuensch)
Digesting A Feral Spirit in its entirety is essentially akin to pounding a big Robitussin High Ball with a Mescaline twist. Hell, I'm not even sure what I'd call the music slowly drifting from my speakers at this very moment. Obviously there's a heavy nod towards the funeral doom genre, an element even more prevalent on Blood of the Black Owl's self-titled '06 endeavor, but this latest record truly trips into an entirely new stratosphere. Trouble is, I'm not quite sure I'm fucked up enough to fully appreciate it, and that's coming from a guy who considers himself an extremely open-minded fan of weird heavy metal.

First of all, let me just say I truly appreciate what Chet W. Scott's delivering with this project: a very environmental, indigenous and primordial soundscape meant to accommodate open-minded metal fans interested in both self-reflected meditation and the idea of returning to a much more feral way of life. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. And you know, the dude goes about his craft in such a creative way, it makes it damn-near impossible to draw comparisons with any other band. While I'd undoubtedly agree that the heart of this project is rooted in the sloooow, menacing traits of funeral doom, A Feral Spirit also throws in a wide variety of quieter instrumentation that adds a lighter, prayer-like feel to the record. Native American flute, (very) slow tribal drums and various rattles pepper nearly every one of these lengthy bouts, but don't let that fool you into thinking this is a wholly relaxing record. There's a very manic and demented shroud draped over quite a bit of this work, and that lunacy touches the heavier moments and many of the softer measures as well, so when I say "meditative" or "prayer-like," think more in terms of tripping balls on peyote in a sweat lodge with a sloth as your spirit guide sorta way.

"Spell of the Elk" opens the album like a quiet, creeping fog slowly billowing from the woods; whispers and grumbles of wolves, crows and coyote's are delivered with accompanying Native American flute and very slow drum beats. This tune and "The Melancholy Article" stand as the album's only fully quiet numbers, with the remaining songs all serving up healthy moments of rhythmic, buzzy riffs that crawl at a funereal pace and spotlight Scott's grumble-gravelly (nearly spoken word) style of vocals. At times the music is a bit too trippy and unsettling for too long a span for my tastes -- the entire second half of "Void", for example -- which can be a bit of a chore when approached stone-sober and not in the middle of the woods. Additionally, I feel Scott relies too much on the echo effect for his voice this time around, which unnecessarily adds to the overall demented state of the record. But these foibles aside, there's really quite a bit to enjoy about A Feral Spirit. "He Who Walked Away from the Fire..." (probably the strongest cut on the record), "Unattainable Vista's of Our Remembrances", "Forest of Decrepitude" and "Journey of the Plague Year" all flash melancholy moments that are actually quite pretty, and when the songs turn towards heavier waters there's a distinct dirty Cirith Ungol flavor that pops in behind the slow riffs at times -- something I actually wish he'd re-focus on for future endeavors.

A Feral Spirit will likely only appeal to the more adventurous of our readers, and it would certainly help if you also count yourself a fan of the funeral doom genre, otherwise I'd steer clear and move on to something much more accessible. There's a few kinks in the armor, as far as I'm concerned, but I really appreciate the fact that Mr. Scott is taking an entirely different approach with this project, and I'd certainly say I'm interested to see where he takes us on the next album. Perhaps he should think about putting the following somewhere on the packaging:

Warning: prolonged exposure to this recording has been known to distort reality, cause hallucinations and enhance perceptions of colors and images. User discretion is advised.

From the Dust Returned
The s/t debut from this Chet W. Scott project was a bleak and wonderfully (or should I say horrifically) realized effort of blackened Northwestern doom, drone, ambient, and a dash of folk. A breath of fresh air, regardless of how much carrion is carried on the scent.

A Feral Spirit is another meditative journey into the grim face of nature, as wholly American as it is disturbing. "Spell of the Elk" is an opening chant set to percussion and subtle ambient synths, with a few droning noises. "Crippling of Age" brings tortured black vocals, paced acoustic drums and a hypnotic wall of fuzzy distorted guitars. A terrifying track, yet it breaks for some scintillating guitars after the halfway point. "He Who Walked Away from the Fire & Laughed as He Bled" is a more psychedelic journey combining all the elements of the first two tracks. "Void" is a black cycle with some clever pipe organ segments dispersed within. "The Melancholy Article" is almost like a super minimal trip hop piece with flutes, horrid poetry and loads of atmosphere. "Unattainable Vistas of Our Remembrance" is a desolate, driven track with a great crescendo of sadly melodic guitars. "Forest of Decrepitude" and "Inter-Weaving the Beyond" are more typical of funeral doom/drone pieces, yet far more interesting than the majority of music in this sub-sub-genre. "Journey of the Plague Year" ends the album, just as hauntingly as it began.

In the end I enjoyed this more than the debut. While that was a pretty colossal effort, this feels slightly more fleshed out and I truly enjoyed the diversity within. It's a beautiful record from start to finish, a hypnotism that is guaranteed to steer your mind to places of longing, into the empty wilderness of both the physical and cerebral world. There is not much else out there like this, it's very much worth owning if you are a fan of any of its musical components. One of the most unique and entrancing 'metal' entities in the US today.

Verdict: Epic Win (9.5/10)

Metal Nightmare webzine (Tom Wren)
Based on my impressions from the debut album, I approached this new release from BLOOD OF THE BLACK OWL with caution, trepidation, and fear. The first album was one powerful piece of work. Most musicians strive their entire lives trying to create something so powerful, but never manage to do so. Surely Daniel Ellis Harrod and Chet W. Scott put everything they had into that album and didn't have anything left. Apparently, they have a whole lot of that "something" left. A Feral Spirit is a very different creature from the debut. While still strongly black metal influenced, BLOOD OF THE BLACK OWL goes beyond black metal into something else. About the best comparison I can come up with would be if NEUROSIS went black metal. This really isn't just an album. It's a ritual. It's the kind of thing that can't really be put into words, but must be experienced by the individual.